Saturday, November 26, 2016

Retro Toy Chest: Billy Goat (1973)

Schaper Toys was one of those companies that eventually was swallowed up by its bigger competitors, or, at the very least, sold some of their products to those bigger companies.

Best known for Cootie, which ultimately became the company's mascot, Schaper came up with some imaginative, if also repetitive games for the kiddo's beginning in the late 60's and into the 70's. One of those games was the Billy Goat game, which was introduced in 1973.

Edit, 8/10/2020: The video has been deleted. We're subbing in a photo of the game box:

Billy Goat | Board Game | BoardGameGeek

The idea is to build the wall in a certain amount of time before the goat comes along and breaks it. The basic concept is similar to some of Schaper's other games (i.e. Don't Break The Ice). Milton Bradley (now part of Hasbro) borrowed the idea, if you will, when they introduced Jenga a few years later, the variation being that you had to avoid the bricks collapsing at the wrong time.

What kind of a bug is a cootie, anyway?

2 comments:

Chris Sobieniak said...

Milton Bradley (now part of Hasbro) borrowed the idea, if you will, when they introduced Jenga a few years later, the variation being that you had to avoid the bricks collapsing at the wrong time.

Jenga technically wasn't invented by Milton Bradley, going by Wiki here!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenga

Of course a similar game I could think of is perhaps Ideal's "Kerplunk" or Pressman's "Topple".

hobbyfan said...

Unoriginal? Yep, but the diff between Jenga and Kerplunk (which we'll get to eventually) was that Jenga used bricks, and Kerplunk, IIRC, used sticks of some kind.